MOVIES: Particle Fever

[dewline]

I saw that particular documentary at the Bytowne today after attending to research and job-hunt chores earlier in the day. If you're at all familiar with the history of the hunt for the Higgs particle, you'll already know what the movie is partly about. The rest of it is about a half-dozen members of the research community that gathered around the project at CERN from 2007 to 2012.

I know this was a Big Damn Deal. It was big enough for Anna Maria Tremonti to devote air time on The Current to it on a couple of occasions, in addition to whatever Bob McDonald was doing for Quirks and Quarks.

So the movie gave me a bit of additional context and human dimension to the whole thing, which I deeply appreciate. It does leave me with a bit of a quandary, and it may take some of you with more physics knowledge than I've got on me at the moment to work through: the discovery of the Higgs seems to have left a couple of the researchers with a bit of a quandary as to what the fact of its existence and the details of it further add up to. Mainly, this "supersymmetry vs. multiverse" argument.

I'm unsure as to why it's necessary for one of these concepts to win out over the other.

Possibly, it's because I've read too many comic books where multiverses were part of the standing menu of the super-hero genre. In fact, you could call that diagnosis of my thinking a certainty. Add in the influence of Mark Gruenwald's work on the Marvel Universe Handbook, particularly his devotion to making the pseudo-science of Marvel fit - however roughly - with the known science of the day, and you can guess the rest of it.

But if anyone is willing to try to answer that "why does one concept have to win" thing...?

Comments

[seawasp]

Well, because the two concepts -- and the theories they are described by -- are mutually exclusive as currently understood. Thus one of them is the true (or at least closer to true) description of the universe, and the other is false. So one has to win out for the same reason that Newton's description of inertia won out over the old theory of impetus.

That doesn't mean the one that wins is absolute truth; it's quite possible that someone will come up with a later theory (presumably to explain areas still not adequately covered) which combines aspects of the "loser" into the "winner".

[m-danson.livejournal.com]

It isn't necessary. Those were the two main theories that were having their hypothesises tested and if they were true/false then there were certain outcomes that could be expected.

In the end, both lost.

The film did point out that something between them had been considered (an unstable universe) but the film didn't focus on that and I got the impression that it hadn't been well developed as a theory with its own set of predictions.

I liked how the film portrayed scientists. It matched what I'm used to seeing. That whole strong defence of a particular theory with letting it go and following the different data when that is appropriate is something I do like about scientists.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

An intriguing interpretation of the conclusions reached by the researchers at that point.

The film seemed more focused by design upon the journey in getting to the point of the 2012 results, rather than the implications of those results. The implications are likely to be wrestled with for a longish while afterwards, so the implications are better summed up in a separate documentary project.

Agreed on the portrayal of the half-dozen protagonists.